


Southern Fried

by TheYsabet



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 2014 Tumblr Secret Santa Gift, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-27
Updated: 2014-12-27
Packaged: 2018-03-03 20:09:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2886005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheYsabet/pseuds/TheYsabet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arguments between brothers over who picks the music and who shuts their piehole; what happens when you tempt fate; and how Baby is a hero, no arguments.</p><p>Written as a Secret Santa gift to thewolvesrunwild, Christmas 2014 (and a day or so late due to one freakin' horrible cold.  Seriously horrible, you have no idea.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Southern Fried

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thewolvesrunwild](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewolvesrunwild/gifts).



_“--you son of a bitch, I’m the best that ever been--”_

“Dean.”

_“--run boys run--”_

“DEAN.”

_“--in the House of the Rising Sun--”_

“.......”

_“--bread pan, pickin’ out dough--”_

“EARTH TO DEAN, COME IN DEAN.”

_“--no chile, no-- SOLO! da deedeedeeedleDEEdeedeeeeaah--”_

“Hey! Charlie Daniels!” Sam Winchester reached one long-fingered hand towards the volume control; it was slapped away. He glared at his brother. “You got a second, or are we late to your next concert?”

Dean Winchester eyed him sideways, fingers still tapping out the fiddle’s rhythm on the steering wheel. “What,” he asked from the height of four years’ more of age that would never quite go away, “is your beef? Driver picks music, that’s the rule. You know that.”

His younger brother rolled his eyes, slumping back in the Impala’s worn seat cushions. “No beef. But you’ve played that thing twice this evening already, and you don’t even _like_ Country, so--”

“Wrong. _Not_ Country.” Dean began counting off, fingertips still flicking like a metronome; outside the rolled-up windows, shreds of mist clung to the edges of the highway and rolled away in disintegrating spirals as the black car’s tires hissed down the asphalt. "Country’s mostly whiny songs about how somebody’s Mama got run over by a train while cheating on their daddy. With a dog in the car. Country-fried Rock isn’t the same, so just shut it. And anyway--” Now the fingers flicked up instead of down. “One: Motley Crue. Two: Lynyrd Skynyrd. Three: freakin _ZZ Top,_ and anybody who doesn’t like ZZ Top can kiss my ass.”

“Country.” The corner of Sam’s mouth twitched, and Dean’s next finger movement had nothing to do with counting. “Better than Mullet Rock, I guess.” The older brother snorted, and the two lapsed into relative silence as they drove on through the middle of nowhere.

Okay, not ‘nowhere’ exactly... They had already been through enough together to know that somewhere there probably was a nowhere in the middle of somewhere, and it probably ate people. And black ‘67 Chevy Impalas. Close enough, though-- a little stretch of nothing between the sorority and fraternity hells of Tallahassee and the vacationer-riddled sunburned stretches of Panama City Beach, Florida. _If it’s called ‘Tourist Season’, why can’t we shoot them?_ thought Sam as he stared out at the dark stretches of papermill-pines that blanketed either side of the highway; he’d had that on a t-shirt when he’d been a teenager. Or maybe Dean had, and he’d borrowed it. One of those.

They had picked up FL-20 (the famed (or not) Blountstown Highway) off of US-231, and the road had narrowed down to a two-lane ribbon that ran monotonous, eastwards and flat through the Florida wetlands for more than an hour; there were few turnoffs and most of them were unpaved-- Hell, most weren’t even graveled or at best were only minimally dusted with that favorite material of Southern roadbuilders, pulverized oyster-shells. I-10 lay somewhere over the horizon along with rumors of some sort of demonic lights appearing at random intervals high above an Arby’s; the pines turned into an uneven stretch of swampy underbrush backed by standard mixed wetlands forest. And for a long stretch there was nothing but the overwhelming sound of tiny green rain-peepers, the fug of wet, fertile soil that never quite got dry, and the sound of the Charlie Daniels Band explaining yet again from the top how good ol’ boys named Johnny (who should’ve been behind the nearest barn with the farmer’s daughter (or son) if he’d had any sense) spent too much time playing with their fiddles.

Dean was attempting to whistle the first bridge between his teeth when the Impala made a sound that could only be interpreted as 

_**CCCCRRRRGGHHK!K!K!!!RRRRCHK!!!1010111000111--** _

and a bump--

\--or so Sam claimed later on when they had made it to the Heart Of Dixie Motel later that same evening. The binary might’ve been pushing it, but the rest was totally agreed upon between them; Baby had screamed. The bump, in retrospect, was troubling but not nearly as important as that scream.

When the skidding and screeching of tires were over with and the Impala sat steaming and hissing on the side of the road, Dean was the first to notice that the rain-peepers had fallen silent. The brothers looked at each other, breath still harsh in their throats, fighting to follow their tiny green brethrens’ examples and hear what they could hear--

Nothing. No demonic clopping of hooves, seductive voices, screams, trainless train-whistles, breaking glass, wolf howls, monstrous sounds of rending flesh, gunshots... not a.....

...peep, so to speak.

Without a word being exchanged, the two climbed out.

It went without saying that they covered for each other as usual while Baby’s condition was determined. It came as a kind of anticlimax (welcome or not) when a jagged, twisted, brassy scrap of metal and wire was disentangled from the Impala’s axle and the damage pronounced “shit, that’s _all?_ Baby, you’re slacking. I am so disappointed in you--” Wirecutters took care of a few more scraps while Sam eyed the weedy margins, expecting... something. They didn’t usually just have random breakdowns; it was almost always a trap, ruse or (heh) twisted coincidence having to do with long-dead psychopaths, abandoned cemeteries or bits of the landscape with ideas above their station. So it was almost (almost) a disappointment when less than forty minutes later they were on their way without anything _at all_ having tried to eat them.

The last twisted scrap of maybe-brass was tossed onto the backseat as Sam chewed his lip nervously. Was that a gray glimmer beneath the brush? Maybe... “Pick something else, okay? Something we can both agree on.”

Dean settled back into the driver’s seat with a grunt of agreement before rummaging around. Moments later, his brother’s involuntary groan followed. “I can’t believe you’re-- _more_ Grits Rock? Jerk!”

 _“--I'm travelin' down the road and I'm flirtin' with disaster--_ bitch-- _pedal to the floor, my life is runnin’ faster--”_

Beneath and around them, Baby hummed as if glad to be moving again too. Behind them, however, the rain-peepers were still silent.

* * *

As the sound of the engine faded away down FL-20, a shambling, muck-encrusted mockery of a man dragged his once finely-dressed self out of the mud a dozen feet away from where the Impala’s tireprints still marked the squelching ground. Futilely attempting to brush mud from a ruined lapel with long musician’s fingers, the handsome black man with the glowing red eyes withered the grass around him as he swore. “Shitheads. Some people have no respect for the classics.”

p>Trudging along the old oystershell north/south road half-buried beneath the underbrush, the minor demon made his way towards nowhere in particular (west of the middle of nowhere), leaving smoking bootprints behind, thanking the Dark Powers that his fiddle had landed in a blackberry bush but wondering all the while where the _Hell_ he could buy a new bow.

Eventually, first one at a time and then in untold thousands, the peepers began to sing.

**Author's Note:**

> I admit to only having seen the first season-and-a-half of Supernatural; please take this as a stab in the dark: possibly well-meant but with only haphazard aim. Hope the recipient likes it! And yes, there are a few references to other fandoms (some easy to spot, some not so easy, I think) buried in the fic. 
> 
> Lastly: No Southern-Fried Rock bands were hurt in the perpetration of this story.


End file.
